The New York-based bank’s asset management division last week paid 31 cents on the dollar, or about $865 million, for bonds issued by state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA in 2014, which mature in 2022, according to five people familiar with the transaction. The price represents a 31% discount on the trading Venezuelan securities maturing the same year.

The investment comes as Mr. Maduro’s detractors lobby hard to block Western financial institutions from doing transactions that support the cash-strapped government, which has been accused by the U.S. and other countries of widespread rights abuses.

Apparently GS is betting that a change in government would double the bonds’ value.

Good luck with that.

This move is peanuts in GS’s $40 billion emerging markets amount out of the $1.3 trillion the asset management branch manages, but Frank Muci at Caracas Chronicles calls it Meth Finance: “It’s like ripping out the electric wiring from the walls of your own house to sell the copper and get your next crystal meth fix.”

The government raised $865 million cash by selling $2.8 billion in previously untapped PDVSA bonds held by the Central Bank. The central bank got just 31 cents on the dollar for the bonds from Goldman Sachs’s asset management arm.
. . .
in return for $865 million now, the government committed to dishing out a total of $3.65 billion through 2022, split between $2.8 billion in principal and $756 million in interest. It’s unbelievable. The government now has to fork up the $865 million three times over by 2022 to make good on the $2.8 billion in bonds —and has to pay a crippling $756 million interest on top of that.

The deal has an “internal rate of return” of 48%. That means this is equivalent to taking out a loan at 48% interest… in dollars!

As long as someone is willing to be part of the debt pyramid scheme, it’ll continue. Let’s hope it’s not the U.S.

While U.S. President Donald Trump has slammed the door shut on Syrian migrants, the governor of Argentina’s San Luis province is happily receiving them through what is seen as the most generous migrant program of its kind in South America. The province is paying for migrants’ flights from Syria and providing housing, jobs, health services, psychological assistance and Spanish lessons so the people escaping civil war can make a new start.

A Venezuelan diplomat in hiding is accusing the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro of selling visas, passports, and even falsified birth certificates out of its embassy in Baghdad to an estimated thousands of Middle Eastern citizens, including at least one confirmed Hezbollah terrorist.

A man identifying himself as Misael López Soto, advisor working out of the Venezuelan embassy in Baghdad, says in a video uploaded to YouTube Wednesday evening that he has had to flee his official position following multiple death threats, after attempting to alert the government in Caracas that its satellite in Baghdad had become a marketplace for falsified documents.

Here’s the video, in Spanish,

(emphasis added)

López also tells the story of a Venezuelan female national who appealed for help from the embassy after her partner, an Iraqi national, beat her physically and attempted to take her to a Sharia court to deprive her of custody over her child. The partner, López says, “had multiple Venezuelan aliases and known ties to drug trafficking.” López says she was rescued and placed on a plane back to Venezuela thanks to his efforts, but the embassy refused to help her. The Venezuelan site Periodista Internacional has identified her as 19-year-old Genesis Torres. The site adds also that, having reached out to López, he estimated that up to 50,000 Middle Eastern nationals have managed to receive counterfeit Venezuelan documentation.

As with the Rahaman Alan Hazil Muhamaad case, they are allegedly registered to vote in the upcoming election,

Most alarmingly for Venezuelan citizens given the upcoming December 6 election, López claims those handed counterfeit Venezuelan documents are registered to vote in Venezuela. “Venezuelan embassies in the Middle East are used to document people that have nothing to do with Venezuela, in mny cases are tied to terrorist organizations,” he says. “Thousands of Arab citizens… have been documented as Venezuelans and are voters within the Venezuelan political system… manipulated by the current government at their convenience.”

BOGOTA: Colombia is investigating a Syrian woman with ties to radical Islam, who traveled to Paris ahead of the attacks on a stolen Israeli passport, sources at the state prosecutor’s office said Thursday.

Seham Al Salkhadi left ahead of Friday’s attacks on a direct flight from Bogota to the French capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport, traveling under the name of Ashira Krieger, the sources said.

Al Salkhadi is suspected of paying off customs officials at the El Dorado international airport in Bogota to be able to travel using a stolen passport, which had been tampered with to modify some details.

She was briefly detained upon her arrival in Paris but was released after a few hours.

Ecuador en vivo (in Spanish. My translation, please link to this post if you use it):

Colombian authorities are working with their French counterparts to determine Al Sakhadi’s [sp] possible involvement in the November 13 attacks, as sources in the Prosecutor’s Office explained to EFE.

The above screen capture shows Al Salkhadi going through customs at the Bogota, Colombia, airport, where she allegedly bribed officials to allow her to board the plane to Paris under the stolen Israeli passport.

Contrary to the Times of India report, Noticias Caracol’s video (in Spanish) shows that the Israeli passport belonged to a man named Baruch Krieger.

Noticias RCN has video (in Spanish) and reports that the bribe amounted to 4 million pesos, or approx. US$1,300 at current exchange rate. Additionally (in Spanish. My translation, please link to this post if you use it):

First, on May 14, 2014, she departed from Daraa, Syria. She later appeared in Tripoli, Lebanon, where she stayed for eight months. She was later spotted in Turkey, after which she traveled to Ecuador, where she stayed for four months.

After this, she appeared in Bogota and, using the fake passport, departed on July 6 for Stockholm, when authorities lost track.

Noticias Caracol’s video showed a letter from Air France confirming that Al Salkhadi traveled to Paris but did not complete the last stage of the trip to Stockholm.

RCN Radio states that Colombian authorities have reported 28 Syrians attempting to travel “through irregular means” this year.

The Colombian authorities have been carrying a greater investigation on corruption of customs and immigration officials. The suspects allegedly charged US$600-$4,000 for allowing criminals through.

The Al Salkhadi case raises a lot of questions regarding the financing and logistics of her extensive travels, and the provenance of the fake passports Syrian women have been caught using in Texas, Costa Rica, and now, Colombia.

There was no sign that a woman who passed through Colombia in July was connected with last week’s Paris attacks, an official with the national prosecutor’s office said on Friday in response to a media report suggesting a possible link.
. . .
Ecuador’s interior minister said the woman entered legally from Brazil, but that it had no record of her leaving Ecuador.

The Department of Homeland Security released a statement to NBC indicating that two Syrian families were taken into custody Tuesday, but clarified that they families weren’t trying to “sneak in.”

DHS confirms that on Tuesday, members of two Syrian families, two men, two women and four children, presented themselves at a port of entry in Laredo. They were taken into custody by CBP and turned over to ICE for further processing. The two adult women and four children were transferred to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. The two men from these families are being held at the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall Texas. Due to privacy issues, no additional information will be provided at this time.

With no direct flights from Syria to Texas, refugees fly from a neighboring country to Mexico or other Central American countries and then make their way into the states.

The Syrians were arrested on Tuesday as they flew into Toncontin airport serving the Honduran capital and failed to make it past airport security checks, a police spokesman, Anibal Baca, told reporters.

“Five Syrian citizens have been detained and will be taken to our offices to be investigated because it is suspected they are carrying false documents, passports stolen in Greece,” Baca said.

They had traveled by air from Syria to Lebanon, then to Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica and on to Honduras.

From there they were to make their way to Honduras’ second city of San Pedro Sula with the aim of going overland through Guatemala, then Mexico and on to the United States, Baca told AFP.[*]

Last evening I engaged in a discussion with a former WH staff member on Facebook. These were my points,

Arab countries are unwilling to take Syrian refugees due to security reasons.

The U.S. border human traffic coming from the south is controlled by cartels, some of the most criminal and violent organizations in the world, which will do anything for money. ISIS can pay.

The FBI said they can’t vet them.

Southcom’s Gen. Kelly testified to Congress that ISIS could move without impediment across the region.

The links I posted above show evidence of a fraud and Syrians attempting to enter the US with fake passports.

Last, but not least, Uruguay took 5 Syrian families (google my blog, “Fausta’s blog Syria Uruguay”), a total of 45 people, which have refused to assimilate, learn the language or take employment. Additionally, there is substantial evidence of wife abuse and child abuse among them; the authorities have washed their hands.

So my question to you is, Why bring thousands here? Why not do other refugee relief aid overseas, in areas secured in their country or adjacent countries?

The discussion remained civilized, and the position of the people favoring unlimited immigration was that we must take all of them since “this is the biggest humanitarian crisis” (yes, someone even brought up Oliver Willis’s tweet – without crediting him). The closest anyone got to answering my question, “Why bring thousands here? Why not do other refugee relief aid overseas, in areas secured in their country or adjacent countries?” was to invoke American Exceptionalism, something Obama doesn’t believe in, or more accurately, believes in opportunistically.

Very few marketing professionals believe that the best way to make a sale is to drop a product on the customer’s doorstep and let them figure out for themselves that it is just what they wanted. That wisdom has not penetrated the White House.

The FB discussion was interesting and revealing, and unusual in that it remained civilized.

However, elsewhere on FB a now-former friend (a personal friend of many years) posted a long paragraph accusing anyone who does not welcome all refugees with open arms of having lost all of their humanity, and despairing of their heartlessness. With statements like that, all one’s left to do is to drop and block that “friend.”

My question, however, remains unanswered, Why bring thousands here? Why not do other refugee relief aid overseas, in areas secured in their country or adjacent countries?

Parting tweet,

Weren’t we told we cannot be the world’s police force? But yet we can now be the world’s department of social services #socialist-insanity

No reason to believe they’re terrorists, authorities are quick to note, as it’s not just terrorists who sometimes steal a passport to get where they’re going. Fair enough, but if this is simple illegal immigration in search of economic opportunity, why make a long journey through Turkey, South America, and Central America to the United States instead of taking advantage of Merkel’s open-borders policy and heading for Germanistan? Also, where’d they get the passports? And why steal them? Is it a simple matter of genuine passports being hard to come by amid the collapse of Syria’s civil state or is there another reason?

On Wednesday, a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News that Cuban paramilitary and special forces units are on the ground in Syria, citing evidence from intelligence reports. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Cuban troops may have been training in Russia and may have arrived in Syria on Russian planes.